FW: The anti-imperialism of fools

Randy Steindorf grsteindorf at hotmail.com
Wed Jun 19 12:16:31 PDT 2002



>
>Wojtek Sokolowski wrote:
>
>>That is contemptible too. That is why I have no sympathy for either side
>>in this clash of two fundamentalisms. However, if this list were rabidly
>>pro-Israeli government, I would be bitching about bulldozing the homes
>>rather than blowing up the buses.
>
>But no one here is "rabidly" pro-bus-blowing. So why the bitching directed
>against a position you've invented for us, not one that's been stated?
>
>Doug

It's the often used "straw man" tactic. Take a stack of straw, shape in what you conceive to be the opponents arguments, cloth it with misinterpretations, misunderstandings, and sometimes outright falsifications, and then attack the strawman as the genuine article. Like strawmen, that may be sufficient to scare off crows, but anyone with insight is going to see through the ruse.

I am reading through Marx critic of Max Stirner in the German Ideology. Much of Marx's criticism revolves around this tactic that Stirner used to attack communism. Stirner used a couple of sources to invent his own brand of communism, and then proceeded to attack the false invention of his own making. The "strawman" tactic has been in existence since the Greek sophists starting teaching their pupils how to defeat their opponents in public debates.

grs

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